Telecommuting popular work option

Faced with rising costs, ongoing labour shortages and the need to find creative solutions to improve productivity, corporations across Canada are finally embracing telecommuting initiatives on a widespread basis, say proponents of the concept.

"Employees are requesting the freedom and flexibility to work remotely, but in many cases it's driven by employers," says Elsbeth Mehrer, manager of workforce development for Calgary Economic Development (CED).

When CED held a forum earlier this year, it attracted companies such as Telus Corp., Axia Netmedia Corp. and Canadian Pacific, who spoke about the benefits and challenges of implementing telework programs company-wide.

CED is now embarking on a three-year telework and distributed work project to set a baseline as to how many companies are using the model, as well as identifying the tools employers will need to move in that direction.

"Our own research suggests employees ... can reduce their actual expenses by about $5,000 a year when they shift to a telecommuting model," says Craig Wilson, a best practices consultant with Avaya Inc., an Internet-based telephone services and technology firm.

But it's not just employees that stand to save money and time by spending less money on gas, lunches, coffee breaks and other work expenses.

Employers are realizing the bottom-line benefits, too.

"One employer simply didn't have the desks to house all of the people they needed, so they had some very specific targets they needed to hit so they could send a good proportion of their staff home," Mehrer says.

In addition to reduced real estate costs, it's another tool to help attract and retain a wider pool of talent. "You have this ability to tap into this workforce that is otherwise not accessible to you," she says.

Retirees, stay-at-home parents, students and the physically disabled are among the groups more likely to consider a job that allows them to telecommute. "It allows employers to reach out to a whole new set of labour markets," Wilson says.

Patti McDougall sees both sides of the benefits as an employer and as an employee who telecommutes occasionally. She's the manager of quality assurance and telecom services for Reliance Protectron Security Services in Mississauga, Ont.

"We were trying to figure out other ways to recruit people into our customer service call centre using the existing resources we had because we were struggling to find people," McDougall says.

After scouring the country for examples, the company turned its sights south of the border. "There weren't a lot of people we could speak to within Canadian industry that were doing it, so we did a lot of research and spoke to companies out of the U.S.," she says.

After working closely with the company's information technology experts, managers and human resources staff, they carefully deployed their own telework initiative for non-emergency call centre staff.

Now the company is expanding the model with its customer service group and McDougall says it has allowed them to keep employees that might have otherwise left, as well as attract new ones.

Effective telecommuting is all about setting clear and realistic performance indicators for employees, along with debunking the myth that just because someone sits in a office for eight hours a day means they're productive. Several studies have shown teleworkers are actually more productive.

The City of Calgary experimented with the concept last year and is in the process of expanding a pilot telework program across its departments by early next year.

There is also a huge environmental benefit with fewer cars on the road each day, not to mention the impact it makes on alleviating traffic chaos and easing infrastructure requirements.

"Calgary is well-positioned given this critical mass of benefits around telework to really be a leader as a region in moving in that direction," Mehrer says.

Derek.Sankey@Telus.net

Facts about telecommuting:

- There are about 800,000 Canadians who telecommute almost daily

- About 2 million to 2.5 million workers telecommute at least one day a week

- Telecommuting one day a week saves an average of 354 litres of gas, which avoids the creation of 464 kilograms of carbon in a year

- Full-time telecommuting avoids the creation of 2,320 kilograms of carbon per employee per year

- Almost 33 per cent of companies surveyed are increasing the use of communications tools to help reduce environmental impact

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Vancouver Flyers

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